


Truly Human

by Valaxiom



Series: Mercy Needs Some Support [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angela "Mercy" Ziegler - Freeform, Angela please go to sleep, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Insomnia, Missing Scene, No Smut, Overworking, PURELY PLATONIC, Perfectionism, Pre-Overwatch, back story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7217338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valaxiom/pseuds/Valaxiom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot looking at how and why Angela Ziegler decided to join Overwatch, despite her pacifist stance on war. Features Pre-76 Jack Morrison, Angela being a raging perfectionist with unrealistically high standards for herself, and Friendship.</p><p>*Updated for minor details as of July 14, 2016.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truly Human

**Author's Note:**

> I just have a lot of feelings about support characters in this game, by which I mean Mercy. She was probably a child prodigy, because at the time of Recall, she's apparently only 37. Assuming she joined Overwatch a while before it fell apart, she was about 32 when it shut down. That means that she became the head surgeon of a hospital while she was still very young. I'm guessing, based on her friendships with Winston and others, that she joined Overwatch several years before it shut down, sometime in her early-middle twenties. 
> 
> (On an unrelated note, If you want to indulge in a bit of fridge horror, you can consider the fact that she and Tracer were probably originally around the same age, at least before the Slipstream happened. Tracer got to watch her friend grow older while she stayed more-or-less the same.)
> 
> On that happy thought, please enjoy!

Angela Ziegler was, and would always be, a professional.

At age twenty, as one of the youngest people to ever rise to become the head of surgery at a high-end European hospital, she could have lived a comfortable, secure life. The yearly salary had been extravagant, she’d had the respect (and envy) of her colleagues, and she enjoyed her work. Angela enjoyed, specifically, helping people.

A cushy life in a removed-from-reality hospital for the elite had not been enough. After barely two years in her new position, she was impatient- being head of surgery became monotonous after a while, and she was always seeing the same problems, over and over again, and always using the same slow methods to treat her patients.

So, she applied to be transferred to the hospital’s research division. The hospital’s board, seeing the transfer request as an indulgence for a young up-and-coming surgeon who wished to expand her horizons, approved the transfer.

Angela’s discovery of workable applications of first-response nanobiology (something assumed to have been impossible), left the hospital board flabbergasted. A week before her twenty-third birthday, Doctor Ziegler had solved a medical mystery that had plagued the field of nanotechnology for decades. Her peers were reverent of her, and surgeons three times her age would stop her in the halls to congratulate her.

Creating a brand-new way to apply technology to save people’s lives, while certainly a good use of her ridiculously large budget, was not enough for Angela.

There were still people hurting, and Angela was determined to help them, and help them _fast_.

When Overwatch offered her a job, a part of her wanted to refuse on basic principles; war was not the answer, was never the answer, and the deaths of her parents served as a constant reminder of that truth. But another part of her, the part that was always burning to help, that _needed_ to help, told her to take it.

Imagine, the part whispered, what you could do if you were allowed to work globally. If you could be on the front lines, actually getting your hands dirty, instead of being cooped up in a sterile operating room with yet another billionaire who was succumbing to the inevitable. Imagine helping people who actually need it, instead of people with money and connections.

The pacifist part of her replied, they’re still sick and we’re still helping people. Look at the nanotechnology we pioneered- was that not a worthy endeavor?

Not if the people who need it the most are kept away from it by red tape and greedy pharmaceutical companies. (Angela had made sure that all of her research and findings were open-source and available at no cost to anyone, anywhere, but the fact remained that the equipment required for the procedures was expensive. Certainly not the kind of classically essential medical supplies that most places were already in desperate need of.)

And besides, the voice whispered, Overwatch are the good guys. Angela had seen all the holovids- who hadn’t? Morrison, Reyes, Amari, Wilhelm, Lindhelm; they were living, breathing legends, all of them, and the opportunity to work with them as an equal was awfully tempting.

The moment that cemented her acceptance of Overwatch’s offer was insignificant by most people’s standards. Angela had been home alone in her massive, echoing apartment, making a cup of tea for herself before working on her latest project, and realized that she was lonely. Her colleagues at the hospital were too in awe of her to ever consider something as small as watching a movie or getting coffee with her. They barely saw her as human at all. When people looked at her now, they saw Doctor Ziegler, genius innovator and surgeon. No one had seen Angela in a long time. The last time anyone had called her “Angie” had been in grade school. As she had gotten older and her brains had been noticed (she’d graduated from her university program at age fifteen, top of the class), the isolation had simply gotten worse.

Angela had been alone for so long, and with Overwatch, perhaps she would be able to find people who felt the same.

The next morning, she phoned the representative who had offered her the placement and was accepted immediately. She packed her bags and left the empty apartment without looking back. There wasn’t anything or anyone in Switzerland she’d miss in particular- just one or two kind old teachers, her piano instructor from when she was a little girl, and the ghosts of her parents.

Everything was replaceable, and Angela was fed up with being nothing to the people around her but a fancy title and a reputation.

Although Overwatch’s main headquarters were also located in Switzerland, Angela soon found herself stationed at Gibraltar. Her budget was basically limitless and Overwatch was willing to provide any resources necessary for her research: it was every scientist’s dream position, and Dr. Ziegler was ruthless in pursuing her quest for being useful to the human race.

So it was a shock when someone entered her lab at three a.m. one night.

Angela had always been an insomniac; tormented as a child with visions of her parents’ deaths, and even later on at times, sleep had never come easy. Throwing herself into her work had become a welcome solace from getting stuck in her own mind, and if she sometimes forgot to collapse in her own bed, well, that was her problem. No one else had ever bothered to nag her about her poor sleeping habits, clearly assuming from her consistently-stellar record that Angela knew her own limits. Besides, weren’t all geniuses insomniacs?

“Commander Morrison? What are you doing up at this hour?”

“I could ask the same of you, doctor,” said the agent. Morrison was the poster-boy for Overwatch, and had the charisma and personality to back it up. Angela had watched him spend hours in the training range with new recruits, endlessly patient and willing to bring out the best in everyone around him. She could sense a kindred spirit in his desire to help those around him, and though she may have disagreed with his choice of a gun over a scalpel, she could certainly respect the man.

“I do not need to sleep, but thank you for your concern.” That was a lie, and Angela knew it; she hadn’t slept for about 42 hours, but the nervous energy was still in her blood, and sleep would be impossible for a while yet. The only way to keep herself from lying awake staring at the ceiling was to work until she was too exhausted to stay vertical.

“Angela, you’re human like the rest of us. Athena told me that you’ve been awake for some time, and your vitals were showing signs of stress. Is there... anything you want to talk about?”

Irritated, Angela put down the hologram model of her latest project, a quick-response medic’s suit. “I am perfectly functional, Commander Morrison. You do not need to worry about me.”

“You can call me Jack, you know. We’re all equals here. And we don’t just need you functional, Angela, we need you to feel welcome. You’ve been hiding in your lab for weeks, and if there’s anything wrong, or if you’re not happy with your decision to join us, you can tell someone. We won’t hold it against you, I promise,” he said, holding his hands out like he was soothing an injured animal.

Angela wavered, for a moment, but a lifetime of holding herself at a distance won out. “I am completely fine... Jack.” He looked a bit happier at her using his first name. “I just need to finish this part right now, and then-“

Morrison reached over and switched off the monitor that had her meticulously-detailed notes on it. Angela stared at the blank screen for a moment, caught off-guard by the fact that someone else had actually dared to interfere with her work. Sure, she’s had research assistants and such at her old job, but none of them had ever so much as dusted the top of her desk, let alone switch off her monitor-

Angela looked up, enraged, but Jack’s eyes had their own kind of intensity to them, and she felt her simmering anger cool abruptly. Her angry protests died when he started talking.

“Now, you need to go to sleep. You’ve been connecting and disconnecting that component of the hologram for the last forty-five minutes, according to Athena. That’s a sign of sheer exhaustion, even for you, doc. You may have been able to fool your colleagues at your old job into thinking that you were fine, but I’m no idiot, and neither are your team mates. Sleep. Now.” The calm tone Jack was speaking in was all the more disconcerting; Angela wasn’t used to being treated as an inferior. All her life, even as a child, she’d been put onto a pedestal and had expectations shoved at her. People would come to her for advice and guidance, even when she was utterly unqualified to assist. No one had ever treated her like she needed to be told what to do, because she had put up such a good front of holding everything together.

Angela felt like protesting, but to her surprise, she found that she was actually feeling kind of tired. All the fight went out of her and she was suddenly aware of her tired bones and sluggish blood, and her all-too-human body giving her the signals that it needed to sleep.

She sighed and stood up, pushing in her chair before walking past Morrison towards the barracks. She had a tiny room all to herself, but the knowledge that there were other people sleeping in the vicinity was reassuring. Her ceiling wouldn’t be keeping her awake much longer.

“Oh, fine. Goodnight, Jack.”

“G’night, Angie.”

 


End file.
